Afropop has a great audio program on Hugh Tracey, who recorded over 250 albums of “traditional” African music around Southern Africa between the 1920s and 1950s. That’s about 20,000 “field recordings” (that’s what the experts call these live recordings) of songs or instrumentals. Tracey and his team also meticulously catalogued these recordings. Though Tracey was a “product of his time,” i.e. British colonialism, and had a short association with Gallo Music (a company that rarely did right by black musicians), you can’t underestimate Tracey’s contribution to African music. In the program, producer Wills Glasspiegel travels to Grahamstown (where the Hugh Tracey Archive is situated), Johannesburg (to talk to musicologist David Copland and BLK JKS drummer, Tshepang Ramoba) as well as Malawi (where Glasspiegel recruits musician Esau Mwamwaya to make some field recordings).
Definitely worth a listen here.
Thanks for this. Awesome, as my students would say.